The Wishing Box Read online

  This is all Richard’s fault. Just because you write horror for a living doesn’t mean your road trip stories need to be macabre.

  “All right. Boys!” Abbie called out. “That’s enough for today. You can come back to the beach in the morning.”

  “Pizza for dinner?” Richard asked, dropping his cigarette in the sand.

  “I’m not sure any place will deliver.”

  “Why don’t you and the boys take a shower and start settling in. I’ll go into town and get us some dinner.”

  She smiled as he kissed her forehead and went off towards the house.

  “Come on, boys! I’m going to count to ten.”

  They came running back at eight.

  Chapter Two

  June 10th– 12:31 PM

  Beachfront, Lakeshore Drive, Mandeville – Louisiana

  There was sand in his eyes. The more Aiden rubbed it, the more painful it became. He screamed, but not in pain. He was furious. He kicked in Dave’s general direction, but his foot didn’t make contact with anything.

  “I hate you!” Aiden screamed. “I’m telling. That will teach you to bully me.”

  “I wasn’t bullying you,” Dave protested. “I just said you’re too little to play with us, you’ll get hurt. And you did, didn’t you?”

  “What a baby,” one of the boys laughed.

  Tears of frustration pooled in Aiden’s eyes and dislodged some of the gritty sand; he could see better than he had a moment ago. He looked back at the boys that had ruined the day. They were taller than Dave, but not by much, and they had a beach ball. What wouldn’t Aiden give to have a beach ball of his own. That’d teach stupid Dave, and his stupid new friends, that Aiden wasn’t a baby, and he could play too.

  “I’m not a baby! Dave’s the baby. He cried last night for Mommy because he had a nightmare.”

  The boys laughed. Dave’s face was red with embarrassment. He pushed Aiden in the sand.

  “I’m telling!” Aiden stomped his little foot in the sand and made a mad dash for the beach house.

  Filled with righteous fury, Aiden pushed the screen door open with a mighty bang. Abbie stood in the kitchen trying to sort through the boxes that had finally been delivered by the moving van that morning.

  “Mom!”

  “Hmm?” Abbie opened a box and rolled her eyes. “He’s mislabeled another one.”

  “Mom!”

  “What, Aiden?” Sharp tone. Not a good start to his righteous crusade against bullying older brothers, and the vagaries of their lofty stature. Yet, Aiden persisted.

  “Dave won’t let me play volleyball with his new friends, and he pushed me so I got sand in my eyes, and I hurt my knee!” He tried not to sound too petulant, but he had learnt that a few tears went a long way to soften his mother up, and gain the upper hand.

  Not this time, though.

  “That’s all very sad, Aiden. Why don’t you help me instead? It’ll be fun. Take this box of your toys upstairs, and store it inside the closet in there. And I mean inside, not scattered all over the floor.”

  “But Mom!”

  “Thank you.”

  Puffing his cheeks in anger at the unfair conduct of adults, Aiden took the small box of toys and hauled it upstairs, step by step.

  “Dad! Could you help me with the box?”

  “I’m setting up my study, kiddo. Ask Mom,” Richard called from the front of the house.

  “I’m busy with the kitchen. Ask Dave.” Abbie’s distracted voice bobbed up the hall like a deflated balloon.

  Aiden rolled his eyes. Mom had totally spaced out. She usually got this way when she was upset about something. He started dragging the box up one stair, then the next. It was so like his parents to completely ignore him at times. It felt like nothing he said was taken seriously, and he was someone to be petted and cooed over. He hated being treated like a baby.

  I’ll show them. I’ll take this box up and then dump it all on Dave’s bed. Let him sort it out.

  Evil plan in place, it became easier to tote the box up the unforgiving stairs and down the hall to the room with a view of the front drive. Aiden would have much preferred the room with the view of the beach, but his parents had laid claim to it. Another unfairness notched against the adults.

  Aiden kicked the box the last few feet into the room with twin beds. He hauled the box over to Dave’s bed, the one closer to the bedroom door, the one Dave choose first even though it was Aiden’s turn to do so. Aiden dumped the entire contents of the toy box on to the freshly made bed, giggling with glee.

  “What are you doing?”

  Aiden screamed and whirled around. His father stood in the door, a mug of coffee in his hands, and a stern frown on his brow.

  “Are you trying to get your brother in trouble?”

  “No.” Aiden’s voice was as small as he felt.

  “Good. You should put those away in the closet.”

  The closet handles were wrought iron. Four slats spanned across the wood marking where the hinges were. It was a tatty old thing, dust nestled inside its carvings, and pushed against the far wall. Aiden made a show of collecting the toys back in the box and taking them up to the closet till his father was satisfied and left. As soon as Richard’s footsteps receded down the stairs, Aiden promptly dropped the box on the floor and kicked the closet doors a few times for good measure.

  Fuming, he paced the room and formulated a plan to run away to teach his family a lesson. Tantalizing images of his distraught parents and guilt-ridden brother made him smile.

  The low creak of protesting wood made him stop in his tracks. The skin on the nape of his neck tickled, and he looked back. The closet door had opened slightly, revealing a sliver of darkness. He must have unlatched it when he kicked it. Aiden peered a little closer, fancying he saw a smudge of red in the gloom. Aiden stepped closer to get a better look. The sudden jangling of music made him jump back a few feet.

  Music was coming from the closet. It sounded scratchy and wobbly, like the old vinyl records his grandfather had in his study back home. Aiden tilted his head to hear the music better, taking a cautious step closer. It was a sweet melody, innocuous, yet engaging. Aiden placed his hand on the smooth edges of the closet door and opened it completely, letting in a shaft of light to dispel the darkness. The song seemed to swell in that moment.

  A small teddy bear sat propped up in one dark corner of the closet, a tartan red bow tied around its neck. It looked forlorn and lost. Aiden picked it up, his anger and frustration forgotten in the face of a surprising discovery.

  The texture of the old toy was unlike any teddy bear Aiden had ever seen. It was rough, and reminded him of the flour and grain sacks at the whole foods store. It was also covered in layers of dust, the tartan bow the color of moldy tomatoes.

  Dodo tipititmanman

  Manman-w ou pa la

  L’alélarivyè

  Si ou pa dodo djab la vamanjé-w

  Dodo pititkrabnankalalou

  The words sounded silly to Aiden, and meant nothing to him, yet he found the song soothing. He checked the teddy bear closely to find the source of the music, his back turned to the open closet. The music stopped. Aiden searched more frantically, wanting to hear the song again, an unexplainable pressure building between his shoulders and the nape of his neck in the heavy silence.

  “Aiden!”

  Aiden looked up, his fingers going still. Dave stood just outside the bedroom door, one side of his face streaked with sand, his cheeks pallid as if all the blood had drained out of him.

  “Aiden, come here.” Dave waved him over frantically, standing absolutely still. “Aiden, get back! Hurry!”

  But he wasn’t looking at Aiden. He was looking directly behind him at the yawning dark mouth of the open closet.

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  The Abandoned House (exclusive story for members of my readers’ list)

  On Halloween night, Scott just wants to go trick-or-treatin
g but his older brother has other plans. He is having a party in an abandoned house on the wrong side of town, and he insists Scott remains outside.

  As the drinks flow so do the stories, until one of them starts to sound too familiar… and a night of fun turns into a night of terror.

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters and places are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The author has taken liberties with locales, including the creation of fictional towns and places, as a mean of creating the necessary circumstances for the story. This book is intended for fictional purposes only.

  Copyright © 2018 by Blake Croft

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.